March is a fun month. There are Canadian geese in the air, basketball on television, water running everywhere and robins singing.

March is also the month for the annual Pops Concert at the public school, and the annual St. Mary Carnival. The Pops Concert is March 25, and the Carnival is March 30.

Fifty years ago, the Pops Concert was called the Turkey Dinner and Pops Concert. Everybody went. Hundreds and hundreds of people feasted on turkey dinner in the Dell Rapids Elementary School gym while the band sat on stage and played their best.

They had a really great band when I was a kid, especially when they marched.

Jim Boise was the band director back then. He ran a tight ship.

Whenever there was a parade downtown, the band was there, decked out in fantastic uniforms complete with spats. There was a majorette, and Mr. Boise even wore a captain's hat as he marched beside them down the street.

The band always stopped on their way down Main Street. They were flashy. The trombone players would lift their horns high and twirl them, and the drummers would lift and twirl their sticks between beats. The lines were always perfectly straight, and so were the diagonals.

Mr. Boise was a Sousa kind of guy, in a way. He was great with marches. I can still hear them playing the Washington Post and the Colonel Bogey March – flawlessly.

But there was something else about the band that I remember from those years, and that is the Band Calendar.

The Band Calendar was Americana personified.

The band fundraised every year with the calendar, in which people would pay to have their names - on their birthdays, anniversaries and any old occasion they wanted signified - for a very small fee. It was a great reference for neighbors and friends, and it's the reason why I still remember a few birthdays.

Both local high schools have a band now. With the nice weather, they will be outside practicing again.

Be sure to mark your calendars for the Pops Concert and the Carnival. Have some fun in March!